Awesome Kale!

Kale is an awesome leafy green that can be added to anything from soups to stews to smoothies. My step-sister chops and freezes it then adds it to her morning protein smoothies. I usually add spinach to mine but Jan swears by kale. I'll try it one day and let you know.

Here is a great article about the advantages of kale by www.organicauthority.com entitled 7 Reasons Kale is the New Beef.

While on our trip, thee was no opportunity to eat vegan unless we had an undressed salad (a rather rude salad but not as rude as these vegetables are...) so we opted for vegetarian as much as we could. If I had really thought about it this would not have come as a surprise as we were just north of Mexico and on the Pacific Ocean where seafood is king. Everything is coated in cheese and creamy sauces. Luckily we walked about 20km per day! We did get vegan food at Disneyland though! We found a cart with hummus and crackers, mango slices, pineapple, giant pickles, and dried fruit and nut mix. It was like a little piece of heaven in a sea of "toxic edibles." We ate, we enjoyed, and we are now thrilled to be back to our plant based diet.

Back to kale!

When we were in the airport in Portland, I found a wrap that proudly advertised that it was vegan so Corey and I shared one with another pot of hummus and crackers (I need to find those here - they are great even if they do produce a lot of waste. Handy to have when I suddenly need a snack on the go! let me know if you ever see these.) The wrap was delicious. More filling than wrap (my mother's complaint about wraps is that they are always more wrap than filling) and very tasty! The filling was: kale, cabbage, broccoli, pea shoots, red grapes, apple, and hazelnuts all chopped small so that you wouldn't pull big chunks out when you bit into the wrap. The filling was mixed with a soy dressing like Little Creek but it wasn't wet and drippy; only enough dressing to add a bit of moisture. Yum! I think I'll make it as a salad.

When I was growing up, we ate borecole (the dutch word for kale but for us it was the whole dish) which consisted of boiling potatoes with an onion and steaming chopped kale and a sliced rookworst on top at the same time. The juices from the sausage would drip through the kale and into the boiling water to flavour the potatoes. The potatoes and onion were mashed and the kale and rookworst mixed in to make a single dish. Apparently a dish used during hard economic times because one sausage could be used to feed a large family with cheap potatoes and kale. Obviously I don't make borecole anymore because I really don't like meat flavoured artificial sausages but the mixing of kale, onion and potato is delicious as a side dish.

And here is the real recipe for the post...

Egyptian Lentil Soup (adapted from The Accidental Vegan by Devra Gartenstein)

8 cups veggie stock
2 tsp sea salt
2 cups brown/blue/green dried lentils (not red or yellow or else it will be mush)
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp dried mint (don't omit this or else it's not Egyptian)
1 bunch kale, remove the middle stem and chop the leaves
1 tbsp lemon juice

Check the lentils carefully for rocks or other debris. Trust me - I've seen beans and rice being dried on the side of the road in China - you don't want to skip this step. Combine the veggie stock, salt, lentils, tomatoes, onion, garlic, cumin, and mint in a pot. Bring it up to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 30-40 minutes. Add the chopped kale. Stir the greens in and let the soup simmer another 20 minutes. Add more stock if needed and stir often near the end of the cooking time to prevent burning. Check that your lentils are cooked. Stir in the lemon juice and serve hot.